abraxas

Because doing chores is not a complete waste of time. It's a mild physical activity and at the very least some rest for the brain and they eyes from the glowing screen.

As for who decides what is hedonism and what is a necessity? I think the society does - in a soft way. When people see others adopt more discipline and shun convenient doodads for slightly more physical work the society as a whole becomes a bit more badass.

I personally would rather bike and walk everywhere. Even if it takes longer and exerts more effort. If some day the majority sees it my way the society as a whole starts to soft push in that direction by altering the city infrastructure to be friendlier to bikes and pedestrians and less accommodating to cars. That's just one example.

Doing your dishes in the sink may feel like a terrible chore if you grew up with a dishwasher. I did not. I can live without one just fine. The benefit is that you get a bit of zen time away from the screen and there is no dishwasher to break and leak every few years.

Some things are necessary for survival and flourishing while others merely remove inconvenience from our lives.

Agricultural technology feeds the people we have around the globe (arguably we have too many people for the planet's capacity but that's a separate topic). Meanwhile some technologies just feed the hedonistic instinct.

Of course the line is blurry in places but cleaning up your messes is definitely the top end of the hedonism treadmill. I may be radical in my views here as I consider a personal automobile one such hedonistic luxury that the society would be better off without. Consider the Netherlands here. By just about any metric you care to measure it's one of the best flourishing societies in the world handily beating the US and Canada on an array of well being stats. Yet they are actively shunning cars and pushing their society towards the "inconvenience" of walking, cycling and public transport. Their society as a whole benefits in many ways.

Most of the world (with the USA leading the pack) is conveniencing itself into an early grave.

Wow, some people really dislike any inconvenience in your lives, don't you?

What will you do pray tell with that extra time? I doubt it will be spent on loftier pursuits. In fact I'm quite certain that for the vast majority it won't be.

Wall-E was a documentary - just shot in the past.

it was a seamless sandwich of glass on both sides - no camera tumour. The metal band around it felt solid (likely stainless steel) and had nicely masked antenna cuts. The phone felt both very light and very solid at the same time.

I still remember the wait lists for OP1, 2 and 3. OnePlusX was the sexiest looking phone anyone ever released, before and since.

loving the comintern neckerchief on it!

so the post-AI landscape is software as a shanty town? That's not a bad analogy. We won't like the looks of it and it will barely function but like real life shanty towns it will function nonetheless.

Something seems afoot at Google. The real tell will be if Demis makes a move. Jeff Dean seems more like a lifer to me.

Moreover, he conveniently forgets the millions of aspiring founders who did not even get into his puppy mill to get a chance to play the 5% odds. In many cases their only obstacle was not being born in the United States and living in California.

Paul if you are so rich why aren't you smart? Or is this the age old problem of getting a man to understand something when his paycheck depends on him not understanding it?

A manual toothbrush. For some reason I enjoy it better than an electric. Same for shaving. I use a safety razor shaver and a shaving brush.

I like my morning ritual to be more of a mindful zen style activity.

Some oligarchs are making out like bandits. This is russia level kleptocracy.

I think a lot of users likely use these models on small hobby projects and not some convoluted enterprise code base. When you're making yet another Space Invaders clone it really won't show much difference. Messy, complex code bases with layers of cruft from decades of patching - that's what separates the model boys from men.

Just because Anthropic chose to implement it like this. But the directive specifically targets non-US nationals.

It's not about cutting edge or not. Fable was able to tear through stuff and always diligent about its own work. In terms of output quality and completeness it was in a league of its own. It will be missed.

Ah, so US citizens are so pure of heart that they can have access it's just the smelly ferigners that must be locked out?

Working on my codebase (~100KLoC across multiple Python modules) I felt that Fable was head and shoulders above 4.x series. It was just relentless and always hell bent on testing and proving its own work. It just tore through problems like an animal. I never seen that behaviour in 4.5-4.8. I can't speak for OpenAI models as I don't use them but Fable was in a different league. Especially when tasked with long horizon goals that involved reasoning at a high and low level to solve the task.

Pure vendetta by the capricious king wannabe. The US is so fucked.

I think this says more about "modern" UI than it does about AI slop. The awfulness of all this comes mostly from the fact that widgets no longer have consistent shape, theme or interaction behaviour ever since desktop paridigms and original Xerox/Parc research were abandoned in favour of web slop. So yeah, this is much more Web Slop than AI Slop. AI is just amplifying it.

We have the "social media" companies to thank for this innovation. They introduced these stupid patterns primarily to keep users locked into their walled gardens and the rest of the industry followed them to the bad place like lemmings. Software is a fashion industry.

No it won't. Everyone knows their favourite film director.

Virtually nobody has their favourite app developer.

Right and ready for the new season of "Black Mirror"

I'm sorry but sometimes performance is not everything. Apple silicon - great except you are now in the Apple walled garden with all the consequences of it. Not to mention perpetually subpar developer experience without the rich Linux/Docker ecosystem. Yes, I know it is getting better but for developers there are still many warts. We just retired the last OSX laptops from my dev team because they were unproductive trying to work around some Docker limitations on OSX/Apple silicon.

You're absolutely right - and I should have tempered that behavior. When the next version lands you get much better responses. Not just trite analogies. Really well spoken responses that earn their keep.

No other LLM has made as much child porn as grok so there is that...

Streamlit seems very much alive. I used it on and off in the past. Went to their website and it looks very much alive.

Ditto for Weights and Biases.

if the index updates are your bottleneck you can often get away with using a much lighter index (for example BRIN) at a cost of slightly slower queries. This is very often a great and much overlooked tradeoff.

On custom colour themes. I have no good ideas. I just know when I like a theme and when I don't. The deafaults in the game, are.... not great for me. Especially the light theme (I generally prefer light themes). I use the dark theme in the game now because light is not that great but dark is also a bit ho hum. So maybe a theme store would be good? A buck a theme or something? I'd rather not do theme imports etc. Too much work and I don't know what I'd like. I'd rather just swipe through a bunch of themes and hit "buy/pick" when I find one I enjoy. That's all.

One small feature I'd propose is that maybe you want to have a "hard mode" baked in where no hints are available? I personally do not use hints to solve the puzzles. I can usually piece everything together just with what's on the board and the word descriptions and never reach for hints. Hints feel a bit like a cop out so I avoid them. Maybe having this as a different game mode is a good idea? I'm not sure - it depends on the complexity of your implementation of you want to create a feature flag or not.

my biggest ask would be for custom colour themes? And maybe a one-time paid app to avoid any future ads (if you are thinking of going down that road). An app or a game with ads and no way to pay my way out of them is an instant uninstall.

Someone in another comment mentioned that they do a timed challenge with friends. This would require signup etc. Even though I sometimes do a race against my son I'd probably not sign up/register just to do this. But if it's purely optional then I think there is some merit there and people who are signup happy may take advantage.

I may also like to see perhaps a second (premium) daily challenge. Not unlimited mode because that would just make me gorge on it and get fed up. But two daily challenges instead of 1 might be something to ponder. Maybe even for a small pay? Just don't make it obnoxious with nags and popups etc.

Thank you for this. Tiled Words is a morning ritual for me now. It's a brief part of my day when I sit down with a coffee and solve it just before starting my work. It's a part of my day I most look forward to. Thank you again.

EDIT: if there is a tip jar or a paid tier for the game, I'll be very happy to chip in!

I'm recycling below a comment[1] I made a few days ago very similar in tone to what the article conveys in a longer form. Unlike the author I believe that the LLM revolution is indeed the most transformative change in technology that my generation and the younger have wiwitnessed. Whether it's going to amount to much more is to be seen, I do agree with the author but unlike him I'm somewhat hopeful and perhaps more credulous.

1. "As someone born in 1975 I always felt until the last couple of years that I had been stuck in a long period of stagnation compared to an earlier generation. My grandmother who was born in the 1910s got to witness adoption of electricity, mass transit, radio, television, telephony, jet flights and even space exploration before I was born. Feels like now is a bit of a catchup after pretty tepid period that was most of my life."